Poppies in a field, Thiepval Wood,
Somme, 2008
Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning
By Jay Winter
For Europe, the toll of war was iconic, mythic, and universal.
It shaped memory, commemoration—and European identity.
T
HE FIRST WORLD WAR IS WHAT MADE EUROPE,
in the twentieth century, European. It created a series
of wounds that, to a degree, have never healed—
staggering casualties of a magnitude that no one had
ever seen before.
When we talk about losses on the scale of the First World
War, we enter surreal terrain. I have great difficulty getting my
mind around one million casualties for the Battle of Verdun in
1916, the longest battle in history, ten months without a break. It
pushed soldiers beyond the limits of human endurance.
The way this war has been remembered, in an array of
commemorative practices, describes what European identity not
only was, but is.
T
here are many reasons why the remembrance of the
First World War is carried on in a defining way. One is
technology. The First World War happened at the very
moment that the film industry became the centerpiece of mass
entertainment. This was the very first filmic war. The technology
provided motion picture cameras for all major armies, but they
almost never filmed battle. Generals didn’t want cameras on the
battlefield because it might produce evidence useful to the other
side. And the film might get back home. What would happen if
families saw it?
There’s a fictional film representation of war which is iconic in
European consciousness about the past. In 1916,
the British propaganda office decided to
make a film to buck up public morale.
They filmed mock episodes with
soldiers in training. The problem was
that people didn’t know it was phony.
When the film was shown in AugustSeptember 1916, twenty million people saw
it—half the population of the country. There has
never been a film seen by half of the population of any country
before that date or since. It broke all box office records. It showed
the preparation for battle, artillery barrage, and men going over
the top, some who slid right down again as if wounded or dead.
Women in theaters fainted. They didn’t know that this was fiction.
As a filmic war, the war turned into myth at the very moment that
it was being fought. Nobody had ever seen the dark side of the
moon that was created by industrialized war.
I’ll give you another powerful example. In February 1916, the
German army decided to push through French lines at Verdun.
In the course of the battle, stories turned into legend. One is the
Trench of the Bayonets. There were no trenches in the Battle of
Verdun; there were isolated pockets of men in big underground
forts, with artillery barrage going on day and night. Little pockets
of men would be caught in one part of the battle, and stayed put
to make sure the Germans would not get through. One group
was buried by a landslide. The weight of mud would move when
artillery hit a particularly wet part of the front. The German
platoon that took it left the bayonets sticking up out of the ground
to indicate where to find the dead. The French interpretation
was, “Here are fifteen French men who stood with their bayonets
until they were buried alive and they didn’t move an inch, ils
ne passeront pas (“they won’t get through”). This is a completely
made-up story, but it became a sacred site, commemorated every
22nd of February.
The Great War created myth in other ways. Another came
from the landing in Gallipoli, the Turkish peninsula south of
Istanbul. The idea of the Allies was to knock Turkey out of the
war, help Russia, and possibly encircle Germany—not by attacking
directly through the Western Front but by coming around, through
Asia Minor. Nobody had a look at the ground where the Allies
were supposed to land. They didn’t take into account the fact that
there were very big cliffs to climb. It was a complete failure. The
landing took place on the night of April 25, 1915, using Australian
Oklahoma Humanities 35
Tyne Cot Cemetery is the resting place for nearly 12,000 soldiers of the Commonwealth Forces.
and New Zealand troops alongside British and French ones. That
landing was the birth of the Australian nation. To this day, Anzac
Day (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is sacred. It’s the
moment of winning national pride through the shedding of blood.
The point is that remembering the First World War is remembering
sacred themes that define nations. The oddity is that these nations
were defined because they were a part of imperial powers, but
this war was the apogee and the
beginning and end of empire. Hence,
nations that affirmed their loyalty to
Britain by dying at Gallipoli earned
the right to break away from Britain—
another sacred moment in how the
Great War turned into myth.
Remembering
the
First
World War is remembering a series of
myths. They’re iconic in the sense that
they describe not just what happened
at a particular moment, but what
the rest of twentieth-century Europe
might become and did become.
The second reason why
remembering the First World War
is iconic in Europe is that it is
universal. It’s family history. Universal
conscription presented armies of
a size that had never before been
pulled together. These armies suffered
casualties of roughly one out of eight
killed and one out of three wounded.
We’re talking about seventy million
men in uniform, nine million killed,
roughly twenty-five million wounded,
Top: Inspired by the WWI poem eight million prisoners of war. One
“In Flanders Fields,” red poppies out of every two men who served in
are an international symbol to the First World War was a casualty.
commemorate soldiers who died
This created an astonishing
in war. Paper poppies, photos,
and
unprecedented challenge of
and other mementos decorate
graves and war memorials commemoration. The commemorative
across Europe. Bottom: Menin forms of the First World War created
Gate Memorial to the Missing, cultural practices that are still
Ypres, Belgium. Inscribed on
important today. Anybody going to
the memorial are more than
54,000 names of British and England on Armistice Day, November
Commonwealth soldiers who were 11, will see everyone wearing a
killed near the Ypres Salient and little red poppy in their lapel. This
have no known grave. At eight is what you buy for a couple of
o’clock each evening, local police
pennies, whatever you want to give,
stop traffic under the gate and the
Last Post is played by volunteer as a contribution to The Royal British
Legion, the biggest charity in Britain.
buglers from Ypres fire station.
36 Fall 2014
It is, to this day, the biggest charity for families and survivors and
successive generations of those who served their country and
were wounded or died.
The mythic representation of war which came out of film
has been matched by a family representation of war that comes
through cultural practices of remembrance. The First World War
was remembered and still is remembered within families. Why
is that? It’s because of the universalization of bereavement. The
problems are threefold. The first is the missing. The second is the
irrelevance of conventional religious practices. The third is the
search for some kind of collective statement of why these men
died. For what? What price, victory?
H
alf of those men who died in the First World War have no
known graves. Not a trace of them exists. (This is exactly
the same proportion of those who were killed at Ground
Zero on 9/11. Half of them vanished completely.) That matters
a great deal to the families who need something to remember,
to mourn. The fact that roughly four million men died without a
trace made commemorating war very, very difficult. Conventional
religious practices require a site, a grave, a place to go to where
individuals can honor those who die.
What ways did they have to handle this? During the war,
nothing, because the confusion was overwhelming. If a family
got a message saying, “Your husband, your brother, your son,
your fiancé is missing in action,” it could mean anything. It could
mean that the individual was in a prison camp. It could mean
that the individual was in a hospital. It could mean that there was
a confusion of identity and that the person was still alive, but
somebody else found his dog tag. It could mean that the person
had been blown to pieces and there was nothing that remained
of him. None of that could be sorted until the end of the war,
and even then it couldn’t be sorted out. This lack of knowledge
is the poignant origin of commemorative practices that followed
it. The scale of human loss in the First World War challenged
conventional institutions and frameworks for understanding what
was happening.
The need to create a substitute tomb, a place in front of which
to mourn is what creates the extraordinary vogue of war memorials.
The enormous development of commemorative forms (in particular
sculptured, architectural war memorials in the twentieth century)
comes from the First World War. Maya Lin studied First World War
memorials before creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Why?
If you go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial you’ll understand
the genius of First World War commemoration: the names are
what matter. To touch the names is the way—inadequate perhaps,
symbolic perhaps—to bring the dead back home, to bring them to
the center of American history, in the middle of the Mall, between
the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Memorial.
The Thiepval Memorial commemorates more than 72,000 soldiers who died on the Somme battlefields, July 1915-March 1918, and have no known
graves. Color images are courtesy and © copyright The First World War Poetry Digital Archive (oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit), University of Oxford; Kate
Lindsay, photographer.
The universalization of mourning in the First World War meant
symbolize the tombs of all those soldiers who died in the war, half
that these war memorials are all over Europe. There are 38,000 of
of whom have no known graves. To start the parade, Clemenceau
them in England. Every village has one. There are 30,000 of them
insisted that the people who led the way were the most badly
in France alone. They are places where, on the 11th of November,
mutilated men of the war, the gueules-cassées (“men with broken
there will be ceremonies. It’s a public holiday in France. The mayor
faces”), the men without arms, without legs. This vanguard of the
of the town will head a procession in which school children will
suffering transformed a victory parade into a day of mourning.
march—in the rain and the sleet, it doesn’t matter—to the local
This was extraordinary.
war memorial. The mayor reads out the names of those who died
The Brits decided they had better do something, too: A
in the First World War. The children, after each name, will say
million men from British forces died in the First World War—we
“présent,” will answer for the men who aren’t there. This bonding
need a victory parade. So, they asked architect Edwin Lutyens
between the living and the dead was a substitute ceremony for
to put together another papier-mâché memorial called The
burials that could never take place.
Cenotaph. They put it right in the middle of Whitehall, right next
How did it all happen? The commemorative wave took place
to 10 Downing Street, next to Buckingham Palace, right in the
through political leadership. There is a fundamental difference
middle of official London. They had their parade. Two million
between the way in which men are remembered, in the winners
people came and deposited whatever they had to offer. This
and in the losers. In the case of Germany, where two million
was an empty tomb, a Greek form. It meant that the language
soldiers died in the First World War, this is an enormously difficult
of commemoration was ecumenical and not Christian. Lutyens
problem. You not only need to remember the dead, but you have
wanted a memorial that would suffice for Hindu soldiers—Muslim
to find a way to answer an eternal question: How is it possible to
soldiers, Jewish soldiers, Anglican, Catholic, Irish, those of no
glorify those who die in war without glorifying war itself?
belief at all—and he found it, the simplest possible way. As a
Most of the time politics became local. Small groups of
result of the extraordinary outpouring of feeling, they had to keep
people in towns and villages took it upon
shoveling away flowers, there were so many
themselves to answer the question: What
things left. These are families who finally
will we do? How will we remember the men
found a way to express a symbolic exchange.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
of our village? We’re talking about three, four
It happens at the Vietnam Wall, too.
Between the crosses, row on row,
brothers in agrarian towns, fathers and sons
People leave things. Why? Those people
That mark our place, and in the sky,
who never came back. Everybody knew
whose names are on the wall have given
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
the families. High politics—the cabinets,
everything—I need to give something.
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
the politicians, the generals—may have set
Pilgrimage is not tourism, it should be
—From “In Flanders Fields”
out certain lines, but what’s extraordinary is
difficult. You should give, not just get. Clearly
by John McCrae
how democratic commemoration was, and
the British people voted with their feet for
how much life there was in civil society to
the national war memorial. So the cabinet
create forms that were separate. That’s why
said, “Lutyens, could you do it again, this
I mentioned the poppy fund. This is a private organization. It’s
time in stone?” He did. A year later when the Unknown Soldier
not a public charity, it’s not the state. It’s civil society speaking its
was buried in Westminster Abbey, people went and paid their
compassionate language of remembering not only the fallen, but
respects. You can still do it today. The Abbey is the home of kings
those left behind.
and poets. The people’s monument is The Cenotaph in Whitehall.
I’ll give you an example of how civil society and state power
It remains so to this day.
vary. On July 14, 1919, just two weeks after the Germans were
Edwin Lutyens designed another set of war memorials that
forced to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there was a
lead us directly to Maya Lin. Thiepval is a small village that no
victory parade in Paris. That parade had a march past the Champslonger exists in the Somme, in northern France. Lutyens was asked
Elysées, through the Arc de Triomphe (it’s only happened twice
to do a memorial for the 72,000 British soldiers who died in that
in history and this was one) to celebrate the victory. The French
one battle and have no known graves. What he created was an
were there. The Americans, the Brits, the Italians—all the Allies
extraordinary arc, an “Arc of Triumph” that has small arches on top
were there.
of it. When you get close, you see that the walls are covered with
Two things happened. One was that Georges Clemenceau,
names. There’s a vanishing point where you suddenly see them.
the French prime minister, decided, We need a symbol of the lost
It’s that which Maya Lin heard about—Lutyens and
generation. So, he had a papier-mâché catafalque built, a big,
commemoration—that inspired her to create the Vietnam Veterans
ornate plinth. On top of it was a cenotaph, an empty tomb to
Memorial. The forms that were created in The Cenotaph have
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endured throughout the twentieth century to describe how war is
remembered. The Cenotaph is pre-Christian, one more move away
from the institutionalization of religion. It’s not that the sacred died
in twentieth-century Europe, it moved out of the churches. It can
be found elsewhere. One of the places where it will be found is in
war memorials that were placed in villages, towns, marketplaces,
all over Europe.
R
eturning to that process of civil society commemorations,
the first thing you have to figure out is: How much does
it cost? The cost factor matters substantially. If you want
something sculptural, something like a piece of architecture, the
cheapest possible form is an obelisk. It has a great advantage
in that it doesn’t require you to distinguish between Protestant,
Catholic, Jew. It’s an ecumenical form and it’s the most popular
one. In France, there are two kinds of representations: a Gallic
rooster or a soldier, the poilu (“the hairy”). For the French, the
idea of a soldier should be hairy, a poilu, somebody who never
shaved, a tough guy. These could be bought through a mail-order
catalog. The images are not triumphal, they are mournful. Again,
this is decided by small groups of people who put together money
to describe the ways that war memorials should be organized,
designed, and paid for. They were paid for, overwhelmingly, by
popular subscription—with sous, francs, deutschmarks, whatever
you had.
What about the inscriptions? Many war memorials list people
either alphabetically or by the year in which they died, rather than
by rank. There is a democracy of death—and of commemoration.
It is something extraordinary that goes on when loss is so general
that it isn’t possible to separate those who died in high rank from
those who died as privates.
Then we come to the third part of the commemorative process.
The first is political—small politics more than big politics. The
second is business—the money, the commissioning, the putting
together of the project. The third is the ritual. What do people do
when they stand in front of a war memorial? The answer is very
different things. The first thing that happens is that women enter
the narrative. Women are at the center of the commemorative
practice. They are not at the center of the narratives of war. There
are those who believe that the gendering of the narratives of war
separates the stories told by soldiers from those of the societies
for which they fought. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but what
we can say is that the ritual that happens in front of memorials are
rituals of families. Historically, women have been associated with
mourning practices since the Egyptians. There are tombs in the
Valley of the Queens in Luxor that show professional mourners,
women who have tears painted on their cheeks, from the time
of the pharaohs. Stabat Mater Dolorosa (“the sorrowful mother
stood”) is a Catholic trope of great power and importance in
understanding how societies configure loss of life in war.
So, women and families are there. There is a didactic function
too: school children come there. This is a very important point.
The rituals have a byword that dominates the message: never
again, the phrase we frequently associate with the Holocaust. The
phrase never again comes out of the First World War. This is the
war to end all wars. This is a war so dreadful that it is not at all the
purpose of commemorative forms to prepare the next generation
for their turn. On the contrary. The notion of commemoration
in inter-war Europe is never again. The names of those who
38 Fall 2014
Two WAACs (Women’s Auxillary Army Corp) tending graves of
the fallen, Abbeville, France. The wreaths are inscribed “To Our
Dear Son” and “To Fred From Mother and All.” Courtesy The
First World War Poetry Digital Archive (oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit),
University of Oxford; © copyright The Imperial War Museum.
died in the Second World War were tacked onto First World War
memorials. Part of the reason is financial; if the First World War
impoverished Europe, the Second World War bankrupted it.
There’s another reason. How many times can you say,
never again? If the idea was that these men died to make war
impossible—their sacrifices were such as to eliminate the need
for their children to go to war—then what do you do in 1939?
This is true in Germany, too, where the outbreak of the Second
World War wasn’t greeted by marching bands and parades. It
was a day of sadness in Germany, as it was elsewhere, because
everybody knew the costs. The Great War told them what war
is. The casualties were so devastating that even the losses of the
Second World War didn’t change the landscape of remembrance
that was constructed between 1918 and 1939.
I
t is clear to me that political culture follows history, follows
the understandings people develop of the world in which
they live. It doesn’t stop militaristic groups like the Nazis,
who wanted to reverse the verdict of 1918 under the Treaty of
Versailles. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the First World
War message of never again survived the Nazis, survived Stalin,
to create a different kind of Europe in which armies don’t matter
anymore. States are defined in terms of the way in which they
defend the wellbeing of their populations, not in terms of the
military force that they can deploy in defense of national interests
or their imperial power. The First World War hammered the nails
in the coffin of the old vision. The story of warfare killed the old
idea of state sovereignty.
The First World War left indelible traces in families, the most
powerful reasons why it remains the iconic disaster that created
a Europe that no one had ever seen before, and that was vastly
different, in the minds of ordinary people, than the Europe that
existed in 1914.
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. He
taught at the University of Cambridge for many years, and is an expert on
the history of the First World War. He won an Emmy in 1997 as co-producer
of the eight-hour television series “The Great War and the Shaping of the
20th Century,” produced by the BBC and PBS. He is editor in chief of the
just published three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War. The
preceding text is adapted from a lecture he delivered at Yale University in
September 2009.